The fundamental and austere practice of putting pencil to paper,
drawing, has always had the ability to embody a sense of urgency and
ephemerality, and as such it occupies a cherished place in the visual arts
hierarchy. An art object produced without interference of clumsy processes and
materials, perched on the edge of its own annihilation (erasure, or worse,
being crumpled and tossed away), is simply irresistible, and, not unlike the
fanatical gardener who wakes at sunrise daily and immediately surveys the
spoils of her efforts, coffee mug in hand, only to repeat the ritual again
before dusk, there is something fortuitous about glimpsing an ever changing
process through stolen frozen stills. Feeling privy to a narrative that is in a
state of becoming, we do not long for
resolution but quite the contrary—our hope is that the cinematic display will
continue indefinitely and that we will have the privilege of witnessing it
though a series of brief evidential markers.Such is the seductive phenomenology of the work of Iris
Eichenberg.

Eichenberg works within a paradigm of art-making that is both
contemporary and idiosyncratic yet is bred of a tradition that can be
understood as an evolution of the methods of figuration—an attempt to depict
our human collective experience in a meaningful and reflective manner, as an
allegory in the broadest sense. Her work has a significant allegiance, albeit
at times a reactionary one, to German Romanticism. Hers is a vision in which
sensory experience is super-charged and the grand themes of life, death, family
and identity lay in the details and not in her veiled narrative. It makes an
argument for meaning from a fragmented, pieced together montage of memory data,
and it negotiates this challenge in the pixilated language of its own post mechanical reproduction time.
Non-confrontational, non-academic and apolitical, yet still capable of
provoking profound discomfort, it is, like the stranger hugging you
unexpectedly on the street, almost unbearably earnest and intimate. It is
ritualistic, requiring an acceptance of the authority of its premise, and it is
work that fuses the urgency of a drawing, the surgical skill of the filmmaker,
and the moral neutrality of the artifact. As an attempt to reclaim and
resurrect something apparently lost in much of contemporary art as political
activity, we must look backwards to understand it.

These final chilling words by Susan Buck-Morss are forever etched in my psyche
like a recurring nightmare that continues to unfold over time. They haunt
because they describe a culture of consumer-based mass media so intoxicating as
to produce a state of societal numbness and self-centeredness in which the
populace could be manipulated into believing anything. In these closing remarks
of her Aesthetics and Anesthetics essay (1992), Buck-Morss refers to the now legendary photographs of
Hitler that were juxtaposed against those of ordinary people featured in
Darwin’s work The Expression ofthe Emotions
in Man and Animals. The
comparisons reveal that Hitler’s facial expressions, which he reportedly
practiced in a mirror under the tutelage of an opera singer, did not project
the expected aggression or rage of a ruthless authoritarian. On the contrary,
they suggested both fear and emotional and physical suffering, a propagandistic
tactic that successfully appealed to an entire nation that saw in his face
their own image. Buck-Morss reminds us that these photos not only stir
recognition of our own reaction to Hitler as “evil incarnate”, but, more
importantly, they remind us how fully the agencies of mass culture can and have
been be used to soothe the sense of alienation that modernity has delivered,
and how dangerous that salve is as the capitalist extravaganza continues to
blind us from the truth of our own apathetic narcissism at the same time that
it encourages and fuels it. One only needs to think of the American Neo-Nazi
movement, and the way it acquires young white male converts by appealing to
their wounded machismo through a messenger who is just like them, a mirror into which their own castrated conceit is
reflected. Within a message that is both familiar and flattering, promising to
focus on our individualized despair by identifying an enemy, the seeds of
fascism have been sown. In an era when the arts seem to actively participate in
the anesthetizing phantasmagoria of commodification, it is possible that it is
an appropriate time for an art that is reactionary, urgent, and sensual, and
that the work of Iris Eichenberg may well represent a noble effort in that
direction.

Buck- Morss published her essay as a response to the more famous
one by Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction (1936), referred to simply as his Artwork
essay. A cursory look at this essay (which has been analyzed ad nauseum) is necessary. In Artwork,
written shortly after the Nazis came to power and Benjamin, a Jewish cultural
critic and Marxist, had fled Germany to France, an examination is made of the
aural and phenomenological characteristics of the traditional handmade art
object, gleaned through sensory cognition, and their replacement with the
political, social and didactic advantages inherent in an art object that is
reproducible by mechanical means, specifically, the newly emerging arts of
photography and film.Benjamin
identified the traditional art object as potentially dangerous, citing both the
glorification of war and industrialization as expressed by the Italian Futurist
manifesto, and the implicit elitism of the ritualized art object. In many ways
history proved him right, as the Nazis advocated a return to more traditional
Romantic modes of art-making as part of a quest for the eradication of the
decadence and depravity of modernity. Although Benjamin acknowledged the importance of sensorium cognito, thinking through the
senses, to the made-by-hand art object, and entertained an idealistic notion
that Marxism would ignite the human sensual experience through labor, he felt
that the shock of modern life, including warfare and industrialization, had
mandated a more significant mission for the arts, and his essay has become
synonymous with “ an affirmation of mass culture and of the new technologies
through which it is disseminated.”

2(Buck-Morss)

The
most rudimentary aspect of Benjamin’s seminal work is on his isolation of the
concept of “aura” as a defining component of the authentic (non reproducible)
work of art, and the perceived benefit of its loss in the ability of
photography and film to provide a politicized, democratic, and accessible art
for the masses. The aura that accompanies a traditional art object requires a
distance that allows for the artwork’s autonomy and disinterested
contemplation, always as part of a ritual (either religious, magical, or, after
the Renaissance, as part of a theology of art based in the notion of “art for
arts sake”). Hence, there is an implied authority of the authentic artwork that
flirts with imperialism. As with phenomena in nature -- contemplation of
mountains from a distance, a beautiful sunset--- our perception of the
uniqueness of the thing perceived is contingent on our inability to reproduce
it, own it (metaphorically speaking), nor bring it any closer-- physically,
theoretically, perceptually--than it is.Again, Benjamin:

…for the first
time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from
its parasitical dependence on ritual... But the instant the criterion of
authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function
of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on
another practice – politics. (Benjamin)

Benjamin was fascinated by the emerging art form of film, and Artwork
became, in the ensuing years, seminal to the field of film criticism. His
discussion of the machinery of film-- cameras, lighting, props and sets, etc.--
and the place of the cameraman (auteur)
within this milieu of the tools of mechanical reproduction, visible to the
maker but invisible to the viewer of the final work, sheds light on the
fascinating process of the penetration and dissection of reality by reality. He
compares the traditional painter/artist and the cameraman/artist, and the
distance (again, the aura or lack thereof) that separates each from his
subject, providing a fascinating analogy using the magician and the surgeon,
respectively, that draws attention to the ability of the new, reproducible
media to both see more than the naked eye and to “critically test” reality,
reassembling the fragments or frames “under a new law” to create “an aspect of
reality that is free of all equipment”. This “penetration of reality”, as
opposed to the mimetic model on which all prior artmaking was based, is central
to Iris Eichenberg’s work, which is oddly cinematic in its democratic use of
both real and reconstructed fragments of reality that seem to present an image
of action and randomness that exists in real frozen time. It is my assertion
that Eichenberg’s work can only be understood in the light of what can be
called the age of post-mechanical reproduction in which we find ourselves today.
Hers is a reactionary vision, an attempt to restore the aura of the traditional
art object with the aesthetic tools of perception of the mechanical age, and to
understand it we must take a brief look at what transpired in the fifty six
years after Benjamin’s essay that resulted in the appearance of the one by
Buck-Morss.

Much changed in the world in the years between 1936 and 1991,
including World War II, the advent of the digital information age,
post-modernism, and the almost complete collapse of the Marxist ideals that
lead to a tragically corrupted Communism. In addition, arguably the most
important German artist of his generation, Joseph Beuys, was producing work
with supercharged materials that addressed, using a personal mythology based on
his experiences in the war, issues of German nationalism, reconciliation, and
social progressiveness. (Interesting, I think, that Iris Eichenberg was born at
almost the exact intersection in time between the two essays). Buck-Morss’
essay addresses the closing remarks of Benjamin’s essay, recognizing that the
new media he innocently championed has produced, in addition to a repertoire of
film, photographic, video, and digital masterpieces that remain some of the
most important artworks of the twentieth century, a consumer-based culture of
fantasy, escapism, and lack of accountability that Benjamin could never have
imagined.Questioning his
tripartite model of art, aesthetics, and politics, she suggests that Benjamin
has engaged in a sort of linguistic roulette in his conclusion, since the
politicizing of art in the way Benjamin advocated would (and did) change the
nature of art as it is defined in modernity. Tracing the concept of aesthetics
as etymologically rooted in the perception of reality through the senses,
continuing with its evolution into the detached contemplation of beauty and the
sublime, she delivers us to its current incarnation as the philosophical and intellectual
study of art. Subsequently, she presents a disturbing picture of the evolution
of mass media into an anesthetic, a
mode by which we are numbed from the shock of an everyday experience plagued
with violence, over-stimulation, industrialization, lack of accountability, and
the detachment from genuine social contact. She outlines the way in which a
neurologically based sensory environment is at the core of social behavior, and
the way in which the commodity-based “phantasmagoria” feeds our narcissism.Thus, modern aesthetics as detached
contemplation and intellectual inquiry joins the rank of drug addition,
television, and consumerism, as an anesthetic with which the
neurologically–based sensorial experience has been rendered numb. (Interesting,
as an aside, that this was one of the major criticisms of the 2002 Mirroring
Evil exhibition at the Jewish Museum—that we were being numbed from the
horror of the Holocaust).Acknowledging that human sensorium is, ultimately, the most reliable
device of both individual and societal accountability and human
self-preservation, she presents the anesthetized state as one that is
perpetually vulnerable to its nemesis or mirror image, fascism. There is an
enemy and the enemy is the media that corrupts.Her final comments offer a frightening presage of the future
of art and the cultural milieu that will produce it.

One may legitimately ask at this point, “What does all of this
have to do with the work of Iris Eichenberg, the new Artist in Residence and
Head of the Metals/Jewelry program at Cranbrook Academy of Art?” Perhaps
nothing, and more likely everything.In
the time intervening between the two essays, much also happened in the art
world. The issue of distance and loss of aura was already pivotal in the work
of the Surrealists and Dadaists, and Marcel Duchamp’s readymades can be
interpreted as early examples of a reverberating echo from the age of
mechanical reproduction. The visceral, socially progressive work of Joseph
Beuys, the most significant mentor to a generation of post-war German artists
that includes Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and Blinky Palermo,
was fueling German artists to both confront their recent past, rise above it
and redefine Germany. Now, in the early twenty-first century, it all seems a
moot point, so complete is the blurring of distinctions between advertising and
art; mass media, visual culture and aesthetic phenomenology; and propaganda and
Realpolitik. However, it is my basic contention that Iris Eichenberg’s work can
be seen as an attempt to restore to art the notion of the aura in a post –mechanical reproduction age. What
exactly do I mean by that? She has taken her experience of reality, shaped by
the non-auratic and omnipotent lens of the photographic, cinematic, and digitized
eras of her time, and panned the landscape of memory for snippets and
fragments, that, once assembled, create a montaged image comprised of bits of
sense-data, both real and constructed, that form a cinematic tableau. They are
indeed three-dimensional drawings. She employs a process of making that
attempts a restoration of the aura through sensual urgency and fragile
tangential relationships that seem to be assembled by chance. The works exist
in a limbo between the aural and non-aural and, as such, they are neither truly
political nor truly detached and authoritarian. It is their neutrality that,
like an artifact, makes them so disarming.

Iris Eichenberg is, arguably, a German artist (she insists her
work is rooted more in Holland since she studied and practiced there), who grew
up during the post post-war generation of the sixties and seventies on a farm
in Gottingen and had an early short career as a nurse. As the old adage goes,
“it takes one to know one”, and I can say with some authority that she has the
soul of a romantic. After meeting her and experiencing her warm, sensual,
nurturing presence, not to mention the repeated appearances of medical
apparatus, body parts, and wound-like images in her work, it seems to make
perfect sense that she gravitated at one time to nursing. Eventually, she
studied jewelry in the Netherlands at the Rietveld Academy, under Onno
Boekhoudt and later Ruudt Peters, and continued to live and work in Holland for
many years, leading the jewelry program at the Rietveld until she moved to
Michigan to accept her current position at Cranbrook two years ago.Having recently visited her at the
Academy, she seems to be infusing the program with a new jewelry-oriented
direction that favors broad material exploration in service of an idea, and
de-emphasizing the more rigorous metalsmithing practice of the Gary Griffin
era.This, again, makes perfect
sense, and the entire metalsmithing and jewelry fields are poised to see how these
changes will be reflected in the student output over the next few years.
Unquestionably, a new era has begun for Metals at Cranbrook.

Conversations with Eichenberg have revealed an attitude that can
be considered anti-craft. Her own training at the Rietveld did not require
intensive metalsmithing practice, and she, admittedly, does not particularly
value labor or technical skill as assets. In fact, her creative endeavors
suggest an obvious disdain for the authoritarian propaganda of the craft
agenda. Eichenberg’s
work, not unlike several other jewelers from the US and more abroad, and a much
larger population in the general arts community, seems to embrace an aesthetic
that can be understood as anti-craft if one interprets craft as an attitude
towards making that respects a defined and structured protocol relevant to
material and process and values labor and technical skill as providing the
credentials with which conceptually advanced work can be explored. Her approach
can be seen as a rebellion against the fascist regime of craft practice that, in
an effort to defend its relevance, has mandated that things be done a certain
way with certain tools and with an unerring respect for tradition that, in
return, promises a certain freedom within the confines of that tradition and
the license to critique it. The rule she snubs goes something like this: You
can make whatever you want as long as it is made well by metalsmithing
standards. In her work, a certain roughness in execution is de rigueur, and this is not to suggest
that the work is haphazard, sloppy, or cavalier, although I suspect that it can
appear to the more traditional metalsmith to be all three. Her work is more
akin to drawing, and she does not let process interfere with urgency.
Nevertheless, in Eichenberg’s work, the rules of making that apply to craft
traditions are most often intentionally disregarded, without apology, and one
must reckon with the impressive self-confidence of a methodology that is
direct, evidentiary, poetic, and both personal yet intentionally ambiguous. She
does not hide, but she also does not give it away.

Eichenberg’s oeuvre is comprised of a dozen or so
titled bodies of work, each accompanied by a modest but handsome catalog,
mostly produced by Galerie Louise Smit in Amsterdam. Several of the catalogs
contain brief essays that are elegantly and lovingly written by Eichenberg’s
partner Renee Hoogland, an accomplished feminist literary critic. Anyway, the
groups of work follow a clear continuum that begins with her early
solipsistic“body part” pieces--
knitted breasts, hearts, and gastrointestinal parts-- and moves on to works
that explore notions of warmth, family, wounding, healing, home and homeland,
and then, after a tabula rasa in Weiss
(White), branch out (literally) to issues of community, cultural
voyeurism, and displacement, ending in her most recent group of works titled Tenement/Timelines.She has moved from the inner to the
outer. The titles of other collections, such as Heimat(Homeland), Warmte (Warm or Warmth); Wolle
(Wool), Bombay Rubber/Delhi Thoughts, and Shurfen (To Dig or Mine)
reveal the evocative mission of her work and the emphasis on an a posteriori, or experiential,
accumulation. The approach is vaguely reminiscent of the early works of Joseph
Beuys, nakedly biographical yet devoid of narrative. I am reminded once again of the all seeing non-auratic lens
of the camera, able to zoom in and out, to magnify and sharpen focus, to
isolate and mete out meaning, to penetrate reality like a surgeon. The resonance
of the work is in its ability to withhold just enough while appearing
effortless.

An
interesting aspect of Iris Eichenberg’s work is her non-hierarchical
relationship to materials and time.Her works are comprised of an array of the precious and mundane—bone,
silver, fabric, tree branches, linen gauze, rubber hosing and vintage hot-water
bottles, knitted wool, porcelain, leather, bits of this or that – a button, a
garter belt clip, a who-knows-what it is—and her reverence (or lack thereof)
for her materials seems unfailingly democratic. The way she snips a hand
outline from leather, or bends a silver wire into a hook, or wraps gauze around
the tip of a white porcelain branch or rhizome, is astounding in its
consistency.There is no apparent
hesitation, no blending to hide connections and transitions, no fussiness, no
extra emphasis on the handwrought silver parts.Each element is charged with its own baggage of memory-data,
which she neither tries to erase nor enhance. There is only a tangential relationship
between parts. Her interest in evidence is obvious but, whether genuine or
fabricated, it is given the same phenomenological weight. Often the fragments
of this or that-- bone, mirror, metal, fabric—are marked by the artist with
scratching, sgraffito, stitching, writing, or molding (as in the carved cast
chicken hearts), but her mark blends almost flawlessly with those left by the
hands of time. In fact, there seems to be no time encased in the works, they
are but a mere breath.She
is a creator of an artifice of reality that is more real than reality itself.
It is an examined, edited, and reassembled reality, and one that owes at least
some debt to the age of mechanical reproduction.

I
confess at this point that I am not going to talk about individual pieces of
Iris Eichenberg, although I will be grateful for the images that will accompany
this text. You, reader, will have to do some work and put the two halves
together. If you are looking in Eichenberg’s work for specific meaning and
symbology, or a well-defined narrative that is directly translatable into
linguistic terms, I cannot accommodate. What I can do is circle around like a
hawk, hoping to get closer still and provide some meaningful context through which to view the work
as through layers of increasingly transparent gauze. This is difficult work,
and it is work that conveys meaning through the senses, and any attempt to
academicize it any further than I already am would amount to butchering. But,
still, I have more yet to say.

Although the Netherlands has been, for the last half
century, the center of a movement in jewelry and body adornment that has
pioneered the exploration of alternative materials and the breaking of social
conventions, and it would be easy to make an assessment of Iris Eichenberg’s
work that seems to fit a Dutch model of material experimentation, social
progressiveness/feminism, and an exploration of the body as political
instrument, I am not going to do that.Holland is not, for me, where her more significant affinity lies.
Eichenberg is, as I’ve already mentioned, a romantic, and her work falls into a
tradition of post-war German work that was forced, after the complete
corruption of Romanticism by the Nazis, to find a new way of expressing that
dark, intensely rich, and sensually-based search for individuation that is at
the heart of German Romanticism. But the residual effects of fascism produced a
culture suspicious of sentimentality, epic masterpieces, and grand themes.
Hence, Joseph Beuys’ quote in the title of my essay, a proclamation he would
often make at the start of lectures late in his career, could as easily be
uttered by Iris Eichenberg.Her
work also began with the wound. Hers is an aesthetic that descends from Beuys,
himself, but also from Georg Baselitz, Reinhard Mucha, Meret Oppenheim, Eva Hesse,
and an entire generation of non-German Fluxus and Arte Povera artists—Robert
Filliou, Jannis Kounellis, et al—whose German-influenced work has entertained
notions of the frozen moment in time utilizing a vocabulary of supercharged
materiality capable of producing poignancy. Not surprising, of course, that the
two most important places that this type of work emerged is in Germany and
Italy—both countries in which fascism, and its after-effects, became an
integral part of cultural identity.

Early works by Iris Eichenberg, from her graduation
exhibition at the Rietveld, and the first years afterwards, included knitted
wool tube-like forms suggesting blood vessels, organs and human orifices which
later developed into sagging empty pink knitted breasts and sanguine hearts,
some suspended from cut branches sealed with wax.These pieces, some of which have de-sexualized renditions of
vaginas, clitorises, and nipples, are more comforting than shocking, more
accessible than clinical, and present an image of femininity that is both
domestic (knitting, of course) and mundanely functional, a body meant to
create, feed, nourish and nurture. She also executed an eccentric collection of
knitted wool garments that are enveloping anthropomorphized objects such as tables
and chairs. All point to a body trying to understand itself in and through the
world. But they are also a body in pain, and the image of propagation as
suggested in the sealed branch is apparently the wound from which begins
Eichenberg’s multi-year process of self-identification.

Two bodies of work appeared in rapid succession, Bombay
Rubber/Delhi Thoughts (2000) and Sunen (2002), In Bombay
Rubber/Delhi Thoughts, which one can deduce is produced from artifacts
collected in India, Eichenberg creates figurative constructions from
out-of-date medical paraphernalia—orange rubber hosing, hot water bottles and
atomizer bulbs, glass labware, bits of ginseng, felt and fabric. Hands, legs,
and body parts figure prominently, as do references to femininity—rubber nipples,
a silver garter belt clip. These works are unexpectedly humorous and silly,
suggesting a child-like fascination with rather sinister suspicious devices.
They are, like the earlier furniture swathed in knitted wool, provocative
attempts at making a bodily connection with the alien world that services that
body.Sunen (which is basically
untranslatable, although it refers to the German words for both kiss and karma,
according to Eichenberg) is an intriguing collection that features brooches
coupled with rear and side view mirrors from cars. Mirrors show up again in
more recent pieces of Eichenberg’s, in which dark ominous figures are produced
by scratching through the metallic surface on the back, suggesting a concept of
afterimage, doppelganger, or alter ego. In Sunen, stacks of fabric are stitched loosely together to create the
brooches, some with stitched and pierced surfaces creating drawing-like marks,
others covered with bits of shell or what appear to be mangled inexpensive
rings. The brooches are reflected in the mirrors, which are partially
obstructed by etched or sandblasted hieroglyphics. The double entendre of the
title suggests the relativity of truth, the impossibility of knowing, the
temporality of perception. One can only guess, and, perhaps, that’s the point.

In 2004, Eichenberg produced Heimat (Homeland),
immediately followed by Weiss (White, 2005), a cathartic
monochrome baptism manifested in all white works of porcelain and linen gauze
and white silver.The rich pieces
in Heimat
recall her bucolic childhood in the German countryside—animal skin and fur,
bone and horn, twigs and the timber of farmhouses and tables, desiccated frogs,
stitching on the run, mending and making do. It is a world ripe with smells and
hard work, the unsparing cycles of life and death, the simple and the
necessary. The works in this group suggest a coming together, a resolution, and
as such they are deeply affecting.It is not surprising that they were followed by a collection in which
the wound has become sanitized and

purified.

The most recent body of work (2007) by Eichenberg, Tenement/Timelines,
is a heartfelt response to the early to mid twentieth century artifacts stored
in the vaults of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York. These artifacts
are testament to the rich, bustling immigrant culture that flourished on
streets named Delancey and Essex and Orchard in the years preceding WWI until
after the Second World War.They
bear witness to a ragtag neighborhood of clotheslines and cramped quarters;
sweat shops and cottage industries, makeshift lives rife with the pungent
aromas of transplanted traditions and reconstituted rites.And, of course, to a culture of
hope mingled with the mourning and loss for those left behind.Eichenberg’s voyeuristic
interest in these relics is quite a departure from the familial ones she
interprets for Heimat, which is rooted in a world she knows experientially
from childhood, and one can only assume that they hold interest to her process
of finding a way to be in the world during her own recent emigration and
assimilation. They also represent a conceptually cumbersome object—meaning
gleaned from an artifact in order to create another. Here I must confess a
nagging bias-- as the grandchild of an immigrant who landed at Ellis Island and
set up shop as a tailor on the Lower East Side-- I am trying desperately to
forgive and accept this apparent cultural opportunism. I keep remembering the
famous line in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer when Binx, a thirty
year old white Southern Baptist insurance salesman, says, “Lately I have become
acutely aware of Jews. Every time I pass a Jew on the street, a Geiger counter
in my head starts rattling away like a machine gun.” He continues, “Jews are my
first real clue…we share the same exile.”Perhaps this romanticized notion of exile is related to the collective
German emotional baggage that seeks to come to terms with a painful history
that manifested itself on the other side of the Atlantic. As Joseph Beuys
himself would have advocated, she looks it in the eye and, without
sentimentality or self-pity, courageously allows herself to feel the
wound.Can one possibly take issue
with that?

Clumps of stacked leather or silver hands, hanging
from rings like so many keys, figure prominently in this grouping, as do
leather strapping, stitching, delicate leather roses as a milliner might
create, lace, carved plastic and coral, and other indicators of the meager
piecework livelihood of these immigrants. (Here again my own history intervenes—my
grandfather used to make us winter coats with fur collars and matching muffs
from the cut-offs of rich ladies’ fur coats that he had altered). Almost all
the works are intended to be worn in the manner of a chatelaine, large key
ring, or tool belt—hooked on the belt or hanging from a button or pocket,
suggesting a proletarian functionality and a badge of survival. Many of her
works are inscribed with registration numbers of some sort—do they refer to the
museum’s cataloging system or perhaps the numbers identifying individuals as
they came off the crowded boats into the new world?As with all of Eichenberg’s works, the table is set with a
careful, but seemingly random array of signifiers, suggesting the uncanny way
necessity makes strange bedfellows. Gestures, all of them.

Although most of Iris Eichenberg’s works are wearable jewelry,
primarily brooches and necklaces, my inclination is to prefer to view the
objects off the body and I find that the wearer’s body is a mere distraction to
the art object as body. Clinging to a contextual trope that they neither rely
on nor actively critique, I find that their wearability represents redundancy.
Surely the works speaks eloquently about the body in a physical and
metaphysical sense, but pinning one on a jacket seems to trivialize the point.
If there’s one thing all of us can understand and relate to quite readily, it’s
the body, and images of breasts, hands, hot-water bottles, enema syringe bulbs,
bandaged limbs, et al are fairly easy to connect with on a visceral level.While visiting Cranbrook, I had
the opportunity to view some of Eichenberg’s works at Paul Kotula’s outstanding
small gallery near Detroit, and to engage in some good-natured debate with him
regarding the relevance and value of “wearing” Eichenberg’s pieces. His
insightful words in response to my concerns are worth noting:

Lisa, you
discussed jewelry as ornament.I
wonder, however, if one can consider jewelry in that same manner since the late
20th century.Much of the
awareness of the body has been on alteration or augmentation.I'm talking the surgical (or
self-imposed) work that emerged when the consciousness of the body became so
askew and less about the intimate reality of body than about the manufactured
body.Iris' work explores this
issue in many ways.

Iris' jewelry
expands the physical body --- literally (hence your question of how one might
actually wear it), but it does it within the awareness of our cultural
body.She brings an unusual
coupling of images, materials and processes to the surface - in a very direct
way. That directness is foremost intimate.The sometimes frightening element of her work may be that
she is reaffirming the beauty of the unaltered (or unmanufactured) - of the
honesty of actions and materials (think craft).She then asks one to wear it!The wearer must believe in Iris' truths and not those of
broader cultural and social spheres enough to feel comfortable to integrate her
jewelry onto his or her body (to hold it close to oneself).If one only wants to experience it from
afar - on the table - then one can only yearn for those sensibilities rather
than participate in them.

Whether you choose to wear or simply look, touch and feel, the
works speak in a coded language that you are not meant to fully understand and
that may be indecipherable. You must, ultimately, trust or not trust, give in
or not give in, and this is the transcendental challenge that Eichenberg
presents. If your intellect is too big or heart too small, they will remain
silent forever. Enter without expectations and the works begin to deliver. Stay
still, for they may be gone tomorrow.